It Suits You Well
"Rachel?"
"Yes."
"Could you teach me about mana manipulation today?"
I asked as we headed for the training grounds together.
The reason was simple enough. If you fall into a medieval fantasy world, there's one thing you absolutely have to pick up: the power to wield mana. I wanted to cultivate that force—magical power.
Fortunately, unlike any number of other fantasy settings, anyone in this world could draw on the mana flowing through the air. The only real limit was the capacity of the core that held it.
Those born with a core far larger than most possessed the talent to become great mages or magicians. Those of middling capacity, like Rachel, could blend mana with martial arts to make up for what they lacked. Those with little could still manage enough to light a campfire or cast a glow. And those with cores so small they were barely worth mentioning could barely use any at all, even in daily life—for all practical purposes, they had none.
That was how the mana theory texts laid it out, so I had to have at least the basic capacity to handle mana myself. What size that capacity actually was, I'd only know by trying.
I'd attempted to awaken my core and move mana based on what I'd read, but of course it wouldn't come so easily. Learning from print alone left me with no real feel for it. If I could watch a demonstration with my own two eyes, I might at least get a handle on the idea—that was the hope behind my question to Rachel.
She was a magic swordsman, after all: the romantic fusion of mana and swordsmanship. The reason she was called the Purple Knight wasn't simply that her hair was violet. She fought by raising a violet mana, and the epithet had settled on her naturally. She'd turned to mana to overcome the physical limits of her strength, and I wanted to know whether I could make use of the same advantage—so I needed to learn mana manipulation from the ground up.
To turn highest-class monsters into ingredients, I would either have to walk the stubborn single path of pure martial arts to the absolute peak, or take the shortcut of inborn magical power. One or the other. Naturally, the latter was easier and faster than the former, which demanded you drag your limits to the edge. Of course, that still came with the condition that your core's capacity had to be something you were born with.
As an aside, the original novel's worldbuilding ranked monsters differently from the usual fantasy fare. Dragons—the ultimate beasts of most fantasy settings—sat at mid-class here, and the whole hierarchy was peculiar. The easiest example: one of the creatures classified as highest-class was the slime.
Put generously, the original had a delightfully original worldview that flipped common sense on its head. Or else—
Maybe the original author was just a slime enthusiast.
According to the monster bestiary, a slime's body was soft yet springy, its hide tough and slick, deflecting every physical attack; magic, too, did nothing except for fire. That alone made them a nightmare to hunt. On top of that, their freely shifting bodies could surge over a hunter like a wave, smother them, drag them into the center, and slowly dissolve them in digestive fluid. Being translucent, the grotesque sight of human flesh melting away was visible the whole time.
Apart from all that horror, their overall shape was the same plump, rounded blob of modern popular imagination. The funny part was that, unlike every other grotesque monster, they looked cute enough that slime pudding reigned as a top-tier dessert among the highest noble houses. Their numbers were vanishingly small and the hunting difficulty was the worst, so I understood the price—but at one small house per plate, it was never going to grace the tea table of a declining baronial house.
If money couldn't buy it, I'd just have to make it myself. For all I knew, the final destination of my culinary travelogue might be slime pudding.
Anyway. Having started late, I badly needed the help of magical power. I only hoped my core's capacity would at least be enough to back up the martial skill I was so belatedly beginning to learn.
Rachel finished her training preparations, took up a wooden practice sword, and answered.
"Mana, you mean?"
"Having magical power would probably help. But I can't get any kind of feel for it from books alone."
"Hmm… I happened upon it myself by chance, so I'm not sure how to explain it to you."
"By chance?"
"Yes. I grasped it on the brink of death. If I hadn't, I wouldn't be standing here now."
Ah. Right. A thoroughly blood-soaked kind of enlightenment, then. Regrettably, I had no intention of staking my life just to learn it, so I had to press my teacher again for a safer approach.
"Could you at least give me a rough sense of how it feels? I think watching you actually do it would help it click."
"……."
Rachel's black eyes turned on me. It had been the same on our first day of training. When her student had begged for an explanation of the basics of swordsmanship, she had looked at me with that exact same expression—eyes full of deliberation. Then she had promised to organize her thoughts and tell me the next day, apologizing for her poor way with words.
It was the same look now, so I figured we would be putting this off until tomorrow as well.
"Very well. I will try to convey the sensation. Please bear with my limited powers of description."
My teacher accepted her student's request without hesitation. Not content with mixing her father's secret honey-water remedy for her student's hangover, or yielding the choicest cut of grilled green lizard tongue, Rachel was now cheerfully taking on a request that might well be more than she could manage. Today she really did seem the kindest teacher imaginable.
"Like this… you take the sensation of something writhing inside you, and lift it upward…"
"Like this… gather it at the heart, then…"
"Like this… send it up to the shoulder…"
"Like this… gather it at the elbow…"
"Like this… send it out to the tip of whichever finger you mean to use…"
Fwoosh!
Violet flame bloomed from both of Rachel's hands.
"Like that. That is how you manipulate mana."
…
……
What a… kind… teacher she was.
See? Pretty easy, right?
It was like watching curly-haired Bob whip out a photorealistic landscape in an instant and ask with a teasing little smile—Rachel's lesson ended just like that. Teacher, we're moving a little fast for first thing in the morning, I wanted to protest, but I knew she had done her absolute best. She had never been taught by anyone, and never taught anyone herself. So I simply dusted off my rear and stood.
Action over words. Practice over theory. Self-taught growth over formal study. Asking Rachel—who had stumbled on this by chance at the edge of life and death—to explain it fluently was a contradictory hope from the start.
More than that, though: something about it landed in a way the books never had. Thanks to her demonstration, the thick fog that had left me with less than a meter of visibility had thinned a little, and my field of view felt wider. To put it a bit dramatically, I almost felt the mana rising from Rachel's core and flowing along her bloodstream.
I was starting to get a feel for it. Seeing once is better than hearing a hundred times—our ancestors had figured that out long ago when it came to real understanding, which was why they'd left us the saying. So that my teacher's effort, limited as her words had been, wouldn't go to waste, I set myself to the work in earnest.
I pressed a hand to the area of my core. For some reason, I could feel a pulse there. And something swirling.
"If you give me time, I can refine the explanation and teach you more carefully."
Rachel said it, but I was already concentrating; the words didn't reach me. Feeling the throb of my core, I tried to draw it upward the way she had.
"Like this… lift it up."
I sealed it at my heart. For an instant my heartbeat quickened.
"Then… up to the shoulders…"
I split the pulse that had gathered in one place out toward both shoulders. My heartbeat gradually slowed.
"Gather it at both elbows…"
I focused on the fingertips where I meant to release it, but something felt blocked; the pulse gathered at my elbows seemed to loosen, and then to slip back toward my shoulders. In the end, the pulse at my left elbow cut out entirely.
I clenched my molars. I put force into my hands. I put force into my gut. For some reason, it felt like the right thing to do.
"……."
My whole body began to tremble. It was a vibration rising from somewhere deep, like a chill, and the weakening pulse broke into a fierce cry again. Then something that had gathered at my right elbow seemed to pour down the fine branching of vessels toward my fingertips—like a roaring thunderbolt sending out thin forked branches.
And then—
Fzt…
Crackle…
Black sparks began to jump above my palm. The light was closer to current than flame; after one thick bolt of brilliance, the spark went out. At the same time, the breath I had been holding broke free, strength drained from my whole body, and I had to brace a hand on my knee and gasp for air.
"Hah… hah…"
Before I knew it, I was soaked through. After evening out my ragged breathing, I straightened my upper body.
"……."
My teacher's face was blank with shock. I had, somehow, managed with almost casual ease the breakthrough she had only grasped in a moment of dying—and I had to scratch the back of my head sheepishly and say something. It came out like an excuse.
"Haha… I, uh, really didn't think that would work…"
A moment later, something I had never seen before entered Rachel's eyes. It was close to what had lit Ariel’s when I'd asked her to recommend a novel.
Exhilaration… excitement…?
Something like that…?
And that evening, when we set out together for Ariel's party, Rachel appeared in a red dress. The shoulders were cut away, and every curve of her figure showed without reservation. It was the first time I had ever seen her look so feminine.
"D-Does it look strange…?"
Rachel asked, shyly smoothing the red fabric. I gave her my honest impression.
"It suits you well."